Queena-Lee Chua’s blog. Excellent.
From http://150.ateneo.edu/blog/?p=792
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I have been receiving some comments re an earlier post, on the necessity for today’s kids to be more resilient. Good parenting is essential for this — and shockingly, past research has been wrong on several counts, notably on ways of raising self-esteem.
In the bestseller “Nurture Shock” Po Bronson quotes from Carol Dweck, a respected psychologist who has studied the effects of praise for decades. Last month I wrote a column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on the book — here are pertinent excerpts:
How do we motivate children to succeed? Experts say, “Raise their self-esteem by praising them constantly.” Indeed, this was parents and teachers were told to do in the 1970s and 1980s. Children were praised to high heavens, everyone got awards, and competition was eliminated in many schools, in the belief that this was exerting too much pressure on kids.
But high self-esteem may not always be a good thing. After reviewing 200 studies, psychologists have found out that high self-esteem did not really improve grades or career achievement. Neither did it decrease violence or alcohol use. In fact, many violent people think very highly—too highly, in fact—of themselves!
In the 1990s, psychologist Carol Dweck at Columbia University started studying the effect of praise on students, using several rounds of experiments, in solving puzzles. Some students were praised for intelligence: “You must be smart at this.” The others were praised for effort: “You must have worked really hard.” To make a long story short, the second group performed significantly better.
Effort, it turns out, is more important than innate intelligence. “Emphasizing effort gives children a variable that they can control, so children see themselves as in control of their success,” Dweck says. “Emphasizing intelligence takes it out of their control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
Excessive praise may backfire, say researchers from Stanford University and Reed College, who reviewed more than 100 studies and discovered that praised students try to avoid risk and lack autonomy. Those who are praised excessively have “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” In college, these students commonly drop out of classes rather than suffer poor scores, and they are afraid to commit to a major because they fear not succeeding. (Sadly, I see this often in my students!)
Worst of all, students who are praised often become very competitive and tear others down. Many resort to cheating. Why do they cheat? Because they cannot deal with failure. Sadly, when families ignore the failure and insist that the child will do better the next time, the latter may even be more pressured to cheat, since failure is something not even acknowledged. How then can children learn from their mistakes?
“Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting,” Bronson and Merryman say. “Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day [such as] ‘we believe in you.’ Similarly, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring.”
Duplicity, indeed.
